Establishment Islam critics continue their serious but unserious rants

From: Jeff in England
Re: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Have you watched or read the text of the recent speeches by Robert Spencer, Melanie Phillips, and Douglas Murray (I haven’t listened to Phares yet) on the FrontPage Restoration weekend link at the top of the FrontPage homepage? [Here are the links to the video and text versions of the panel.] Very impressive speeches, especially from Melanie who was in blistering form. And I mean blistering. The others were in good form as well. Which makes it all the worse that after a couple of hours of clear crisp and witty descriptions of the horrors of various aspects of Islam and (certain) Muslims past and present, not one of the three speakers proposed to stop Muslims coming in to the West, especially given the huge numbers they are coming in, a fact which all the speakers alluded to.

I know I’ve said this sort of statement before but these were no holds barred heavyweight speeches to a very conservative audience (probably mostly neo-conservative but I’m not sure). So you would think one of these three “BRAVE” speakers, all very influential in the outside world, would DARE to suggest that Muslims should not come in to the West for a while. Even if it was just for a short while. A “teeny weeny while” to quote a phrase! NOPE.

Not a single mention of that sort of solution. Instead all three basically said if Muslims want to come here they have to play by our rules or else not come. Ha! As if that will stop one single Muslim in his/her tracks. And as if that will instantly de-radicalise the so called fundamentalist (I won’t digress here as to whether moderate Muslims exist at all) Muslims and make them patriotic citizens and supporters of Western civilisation. And most importantly, as if that will stop them becoming a majority in various Western countries in the near future.

I thought this time these speakers would at least mention the possibility of some sort of quota system. Even if they were against it. NOPE! Again, I know I’ve expressed shock before, but because of the nature of this particular conference, I am in more shock than usual. And angry too. Because we can’t continue to let these speakers waffle on how dangerous Islam and “Radical Fundamentalist Muslims are (which they do with great skill) without offering a solution to the near future demographic Muslim takeover of Western countries those very speakers predict. When I say they shouldn’t be allowed to waffle on, I don’t mean physically confronting them by force; rather I mean that after every speech or column that they make or write without mentioning an immigration quota they will be called to account why they haven’t mentioned that such a quota should be enacted or at least discussed in a serious way.. Otherwise, ENOUGH of their clever speeches and ENOUGH of their columns and ENOUGH of their radio appearances and let someone else take the mantle who can suggest what needs to be done.

LA writes:

Well, we can see how much good has been accomplished by my repeated calls for Spencer and Phillips to be forthright about the immigration issue .

One thing that strikes me from Jeff’s account—and I get no pleasure from saying this because I admire Melanie Phillips, but it must be said because it’s true and it’s part of the record—is that she lied to me. Last summer when I had an exchange with her that was published with her permission at this site, she angrily insisted that I was unfairly misrepresenting her position when I criticized her for not calling for restrictions on Muslim immigration. To back up her claim, she then sent me a section of the last chapter of her book that called for a “pause” of all immigration to Britain, but, as I explained subsequently, it turned out that the same passage in the published edition of her book (which was already published when she sent me the excerpt) only called for undefined “tough controls” on immigration. That was bad enough. But now it’s worse. Melanie has just been at a major conservative conference in the U.S., speaking to as hard-line a group on the Islam issue as you can find anywhere, she was speaking at length on the horrors of Islamization, and, according to Jeff who listened to the whole thing, she didn’t say a single word about restricting immigration. If she was going to speak in any venue about restricting Muslim immigration, it would have been here. So her bitter accusation that I was misrepresenting her position on immigration and that she had indeed called for restrictions (and she acted as if I and everyone should know this, even though nobody had ever seen her say anything of the kind), a claim she made in the published exchange at VFR (in a subsequent private exchange she again accused me of misrepresenting her views and told me never to write to her again) was flat-out false. This was not just some mix-up or innocent misunderstanding. She indignantly claimed to have taken a position on a certain issue that in fact she had not taken at the time that she made the claim, nor has she taken it at any point since then.

LA continues:

In a follow-up, Jeff wonders if he has been unfair to Spencer, because

he might argue that his last paragraph or two implies immigration restrictions…. This is the tricky part of dealing with these commentators. Lots of shades of gray which they hide behind. They can always say they didn’t say there shouldn’t be immigration quotas. Spencer speaks a phrase near the end urging us to “act accordingly.”

Jeff should have no fear that he has misrepresented Spencer. There is nothing here remotely about immigration. Some vague thing about needing to stop the advance of Islam in the West, but he doesn’t even hint at what that means. Spencer quotes a U.S. Muslim professor, Muqtedar Khan (discussed at VFR), who on a visit to Oxford University smugly reflects “that military defeats do not stop the advance of civilizations and the globalization of Islam is unimpeded by the material and military weakness of the Muslim world.” Spencer then says (and it’s the last sentence of his talk) that we should “very carefully consider [Khan’s] words in all their implications and act accordingly.” But what does that mean? What are those implications? If these implications are so vitally important and we must consider them very carefully, why doesn’t Spencer spell them out? How can we consider them very carefully if we don’t talk about them and if we don’t even know what they are?

So it’s exactly as Jeff has previously put it: The modus operandi of these unserious Islam critics is best described by sexual metaphors. They keep conspicuously flirting with something, acting as though they’re interested, but in the end they never want to “put out.” It is not an honorable or a manly way of dealing with the greatest challenge facing our civilization.

Here are the final paragraphs of Spencer’s talk:

Finally, Muqtedar Khan, of the Center for Islam and Democracy, recently quoted Edward Gibbon, the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon, when speaking about the Battle of Tours in 732, had said that if the Franks had not won the Battle of Tours, then the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and their pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.
Muqtedar Khan says that he reflected on this while sitting in a coffee shop in Oxford, looking at the splendid domes and minarets of the two large mosques that have recently been built there. He said, “Gibbon would have been surprised to learn the lesson that military defeats do not stop the advance of civilizations and the globalization of Islam is unimpeded by the material and military weakness of the Muslim world.”
I would suggest that it is a vital question for the survival of our own nation and our own civilization that we consider his words very carefully in all their implications and act accordingly. Thank you.

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Clarification

Here are responses by Jeff and me to possible misunderstandings of our above comments.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 10, 2006 07:14 PM | Send